The Principle of Equivalence - Newtonian Gravity

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Newton came along with ordinary Newtonian mechanics, the thing that made him money was using it to predict the planets moving around the sun. Under the force of gravity, right, when you have a new theory of mechanics, the first thing you want to do is figure out how gravity works in it. And so when you come up with relativity, electromagnetism fits into it very, very nicely, but Newtonian gravity didn't. So you were going to have to change Newton's theory of gravity a little bit.

My little pandemic-lockdown contribution to the world was a series of videos called The Biggest Ideas in the Universe. The idea was to explain physics in a pedagogical way, concentrating on established ideas rather than speculations, with the twist that I tried to include and explain any equations that seemed useful, even though no prior mathematical knowledge was presumed. I’m in the process of writing a series of three books inspired by those videos, and the first one is coming out now: The Biggest Ideas In The Universe: Space, Time, and Motion. For this solo episode I go through one of the highlights from the book: explaining the mathematical and physical basis of Einstein’s equation of general relativity, relating mass and energy to the curvature of spacetime. Hope it works!

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